Gang Leader for a Day

A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

By Sudhir Venkatesh

THE PENGUIN PRESS; 302 PAGES; $25.95

Sudhir Venkatesh was hardly the sort of person you'd expect to find wandering around the housing projects of inner-city Chicago. "With my pony-tail and tie-dyed shirt, I must have looked pretty out of place," he confesses at the beginning of "Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Street." But Venkatesh wasn't interested in fitting in. He was interested in proving a point.

As a first-year graduate student at the University of Chicago, he was already skeptical of the way his professors conducted their research. According to Venkatesh, they were too caught up in the statistics of crime and poverty and not interested nearly enough in actual people. So, in 1989, this Indian-born Deadhead who grew up in a California suburb decided to correct this oversight.

"Gang Leader for a Day" provides an often compelling, if amateurishly written, account of his quest. Under the protection of J.T., a middle manager in a citywide crack-dealing operation, Venkatesh sets himself up at the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the nation's largest and poorest housing projects. Over seven years of study, he hangs out with gangsters, witnesses drive-bys and - remarkably - even participates in the beating of a man accused of abusing his girlfriend. Venkatesh's research provides groundbreaking insights into the corporate-like hierarchy of drug dealers. It reveals the intricate shadow economy of the high-rise hustlers and the ways legitimate neighborhood businesses support it. And, most effectively, it offers a heartbreaking glimpse of how residents struggle just to survive in a place where even emergency vehicles fear to venture.

"Always know somebody at the hospital," one young woman tells him. "Always have somebody you can call because that ambulance never comes."

Venkatesh is best known for having his drug-economy research featured in Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's 2005 best-seller, "Freakonomics." A professor at Columbia University in New York, Venkatesh has published several books on gang life and poverty, including "Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor" (2006) and "American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto" (2000). The latter, coupled with his 2005 documentary film "Dislocation," amounts to a passionate and thoroughly argued case against Chicago's eventual decision to tear down the Robert Taylor high-rises and disperse a small city's worth of occupants.

Venkatesh wasn't always an expert, though. In fact, his initial efforts at field research are almost comically naive.

When some Robert Taylor men demand to know why he's hanging around, Venkatesh responds with a questionnaire. "How does it feel to be black and poor?" he asks. "Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good."

The men reply with a barrage of obscenity and, for a time, even hold him hostage.

Too often, though, Venkatesh's wide-eyed innocence threatens to derail his narrative. For instance, what kind of sociologist - rogue or otherwise - considers it necessary to point out, 174 pages into his adventure, that "life in the projects wasn't like my life in the suburbs"? What kind of sociologist takes years to figure out that cavorting with drug dealers might pose ethical problems? Or that actually taking over a gang for a day - a gang that deals crack, pimps women and administers various forms of violence - might "lay a bit out of bounds of the typical academic research"?

The oblivious kind, apparently.

At the heart of the book is J.T. He's a complex character - college educated, interested in management, brutally violent - and Venkatesh necessarily has a difficult and complex relationship with him. Venkatesh allows J.T. to think, erroneously, that he's writing a biography about him, while J.T. often manipulates Venkatesh for his own nefarious purposes. In one memorable scene, J.T. and Ms. Bailey, the crafty building president, debrief Venkatesh on weeks' worth of interviews he has done on the subject of the projects' underground economy. They use this information to tax anyone making money behind their backs and, in the process, destroy Venkatesh's credibility with Robert Taylor's residents.

That it takes him forever to realize what has happened is typical. "I could feel people staring at me," he writes. "But I couldn't figure out why." A hustler called C-Note is as surprised as the reader that Venkatesh doesn't get it.

"I know you ain't that naive, man," he snaps.

But again and again, Venkatesh is that naive. As "Gang Leader for a Day" progresses, he finds himself caught between corrupt city housing officials, mendacious cops, paranoid gangsters and increasingly desperate residents. At times it seems like a miracle he got out alive.

When shots are heard in a building courtyard, people dive for cover, pause and then resume their business as if nothing had happened. "My heart kept racing for several minutes," Venkatesh writes, "but even I wasn't surprised by now that nobody even bothered to call the police." Such was life at Robert Taylor. {sbox}